Seeing It Differently: How Leaders Shape Reality by What They Choose to Notice

All right folks, we're still seeing people trickle in, but we're going to go ahead and get up and running. We have another Beyond Limits session. Thank you all for being here. Sharing some time with us on a Friday. Now afternoon on the East Coast.

Friday morning if you're here on the West Coast with me, we are going to be spending probably about 45 minutes or so together today. This session is designed to wrap up just a little bit earlier, get you some of your Friday back, and uh, we will always stick around at the end for additional questions. So if anybody has any pressing thoughts or questions, we can stick around till the end but have that chat open. We're going to be using the chat a whole bunch, so we'll ask that you use the chat as much as you can for comments, for communication, for staying in touch with us for engagement. There's going to be a few opportunities today where I'm going to ask for feedback.

You're welcome to come off of mute and uh, provide any, any, uh, thoughts that you have at that time. But a lot of what we're going to be talking about today is seeing things differently. As leaders, we have different perspective than others and what we want to focus on today is really seeing how we shape reality by what we choose to see, what we choose not to see, what we are intentionally looking for, and sometimes what we accidentally miss. So the very first thing that I'm going to do is the first of several visual activities. Today I would like everybody to take a quick look at this, share your thoughts in the chat.

What do you think about when you look at an image like this and you see that they are the same image side by side, you can put whether or not you agree with me or disagree with me in the chat. How many people are itching to take a screenshot and then copy the two and put one on top of another? Like I know Richard did the first time I showed him this picture during our session today, you're going to see this green box pop up a lot. And when you see this green box pop up, this is your green light to put whatever thoughts you have. So when you look at this and you say, wow, that's amazing.

This is a perfectly good opportunity to type the words. Wow, that's amazing. Or you can say what Jim did and sAId, they're not identical, that's not possible. And others might say, no, no, it's a leading line trick. Trust me, I've got a degree in graphic arts.

So this is an opportunity to put all of your chats, all of your thoughts, all of your real time reactions, and it's a reminder from me to you. You might find some in here, maybe you'll give some back. This is something I learned from my good friend Tracy Smith. Typos are gifts and we consider them as such and we really look forward to seeing what typos you might have to share with us. Hit enter when you put your thoughts.

It's okay if there's a typo. We thank you in advance for any potential that you have. So let's get up and running. So when we want to talk about seeing things differently, it's all about taking a look at the world around us and trying to see if we can observe the unobservable or pick up on what we're missing. If you've done work with us in the past, you know, we talk about the reticular activating system or the Raz as that mechanism that we use that helps filter all of the chaos that goes on in the world around us, down to just the small digestible parts that we call reality.

Just what we choose to see. And if we can change that lens and change that filter, oftentimes there's a lot more going on around us than we recognize. The example I like to give during football season is if you lock into your television on Sundays, and it doesn't matter what other people say because you're focused in and you turn into me on a Sunday, the house catches fire, but hey, football's on television, you're locking out. We're going to try to talk about how we can do that, maybe not so, uh, intentionally in other areas of our life. So we're going to do a couple

of activities throughout our time today, but just to give you an idea, want to make sure we level set and explAIn who the heck we are at The Pacific Institute because a handful of you sAId that this is your first time coming. So if so, at a very high level, we want to explAIn who we are at The Pacific Institute. And here's what we believe about you, your team and your organization. We believe that you are perfectly designed for the results that you're getting. We believe that you are a flawlessly designed person, team, organization for getting the exact results that you're getting.

Now. You have followed the recipe absolutely perfectly to get the exact results that you have today. And if you would like for those results to stay exactly the same and make no changes at all, you can keep following the exact same recipe. If you're like many of us who've decided that there are areas in your life that you perhaps want more. And that can be absolutely anything that can be more personal or professional growth, more alignment, more energy, more innovation, more quality time with your kids, more revenue, more insert whatever it is that you're looking more for.

It won't come from the outside, it'll come from the inside. It'll start with the conversation that exists right in between your right ear and your left. The self-talk, the conversation, the thoughts in your head. My good friend Cheryl Hicks always says, you need to tap into your causative power, your ability to cause changes in the world around you. At The Pacific Institute, we call that self-efficacy, your belief in your own ability to cause and handle changes around you.

In other words, your ability to adapt and be resilient and grow. So what we do here, we help people unlock their ability to do exactly that by thinking differently, by acting differently, by behaving differently, and ultimately being able to create a future that they want, not by accident, but by intent, by design. So even if you've ended up where you are in your life today and you've thought it's great, it's wonderful, but I don't know how the heck I got here. That's exactly what we want to try to do is help folks with that recipe. And we know where the recipe begins.

We know it starts on the inside. If you were around a long time ago, let's say roughly 54 years ago when The Pacific Institute started, you would've met Lou Tyson. He would've sAId, all meaningful and lasting change starts on the inside and it works its way out. Which means if we're going to make big changes, we're going to do anything at all. Whether that's lose five pounds or whether that's adopt a puppy, or whether that's start a startup company that becomes a billion dollar organization, it's all going to start on the inside with the thought and the decision to do so.

And when we make that thought decision to do so and we make that change, we're able to transform ourselves. We can go one tier up. Our Pacific Institute flame is all about going one level higher. So when you move from positively impacting yourselves, then you can start to impact the people around you. And that might be your team, that might be your family.

But once that impact has been made and you transform and you find yourself a new person and a new family, then you're going to start finding that you can collectively impact the greater community, the greater organization, hopefully the whole darn world. We say it's one to one to one to infinity around here, we're trying to connect to everybody one person at a time. One of our core tenants is exactly this. Beliefs drive behavior. If you're going to do it, first things first, you're going to have to think it.

Which means if we want to change our results, first things first, we have to change our beliefs. It's just a chAIn. Beliefs drive behavior. Behavior drives results. If you're a leader, meaning you have people who work for you and you lead those individuals you manage or you supervise, your job is results.

It is to drive results from those individuals. Most of us spend a lot of time working on other things besides the beliefs of those individuals. If you start one step sooner, we remember this quote from Seth Goodin, people don't believe what you tell them. They rarely believe what you show them. They usually believe what their friends tell them.

And who do they always believe? They always believe what they tell themselves. That universal truth that goes on inside of our head. And Lou Tice used to say, you have to be careful what you're saying to yourself because you're always listening and you're always telling yourself the truth at all times. So since that conversation is happening in your head over

and over and over and you're telling yourself the truth, we're going to be looking for things that affirm that truth. In other words, confirmation bias. So our time today is going to be spent focusing on what do we see and how do we see it just a little bit differently. So I'm going to ask everybody just to spend what we're looking at for the next 51 minutes or so and try to practice looking at things differently. Today is not so much of a lesson.

You might learn a thing or two, but this is more of a space to think. Share your thoughts in the chat. Come off of mute and share them aloud if you'd like to. But here's a thought to start the day with, and that is, what if the most powerful shift that you can make is not what you do? What if the most powerful shift is not in what you do, but in what you see, what you pick up, what you perceive, what you can actually notice going on around you, that raz, that reticular activating system, that filter that helps us identify what goes on in the world that's helping us identify what we see.

RAIse your hand be honest. If you've ever spent time looking for your cell phone while holding your cell phone, rAIse your hands. If you've ever misplaced the glasses that you're wearing and thought, I can still read all of these things, why can't I find my reading glasses? Right? We've all done these things before I misplaced a hat for the better part of an hour that I was wearing, tore my house apart, looking for it.

It wasn't until I walked by a mirror before I realized, oh, this was a perspective issue. But as soon as I sAId to myself and the entire family, I can't find my hat, it must be lost. All I was able to do is find affirmation in the world around me that it sure was. So today's focus, what are we paying attention to in a short phrase or a couple of words or a lot. If you can type fast, what are you focusing on here on November 7th as we close out 2025, take a look at the chat, let's see what's going on Richard and others.

Feel free to call 'em out as you see 'em. There's some darn good stuff on here. Some new career moves. Very exciting. Creating a vision for the future.

When I say finishing the quarter strong, a lot of people nod along, but I like that one. Jim, finishing the quarter positively. Good sales answer. Increasing some revenue. These are, here's what I noticed, Kevin, is that these are all really positive, including blocking out social media.

Um, even Lolly Roberts, right? An unanticipated mercy at work at a time. We thought we'd have some why at times we regroup and get caught up. These are all statements about, um, clear pictures of the current reality, right? And in many cases a replacement picture.

That's what I'm seeing. The part that I like about a lot of these is when I see them, I'm thinking about the positive. Like Richard says, most of these are written in the positive and that's an important concept because our brAIn is no good. In fact, it is incapable of processing the negative. So let's do a test.

Everybody. I'm going to forbid you do not think about the thing that I say next. Don't think about it elephants. Ah, you ruined it. Because our brAIn just simply can't do that.

Our brAIn doesn't understand not something. Which is why when we're looking forward to these types of things, it's good that we're focusing on the positivity because it's good that we want to find what we're looking for and not put that negative thought in there, right? It's not a, it's not a matter of the activity that we want to stop. It's what is the behavior that we want to start. Excellent stuff in here.

I'm very happy to see that folks have some really good goals. There's also a lot of commonality. I saw a lot of folks kind of nodding along, seeing some answers that others have. Just a reminder, we are all facing year end goals. I don't know anybody who works in any organization that doesn't know that the year end is coming.

So we're all facing the same type of stuff, but we get focused on certAIn things. And once we focus on one thing, like me trying

to find the hat that I was wearing, it's hard to focus on something else. So let's do another activity and focus on what we look at. We're looking at a nice purple screen here. Now, I would like for everybody to tell me which one of these 16 flowers is purple. Which is the purple one you can answer in the chat.

Let's see what the answers are. Many answers are coming in suggesting that all of them are purple. But what if I told you to look really closely at that one on the top left? If I sAId suspend whatever it is that you think, and I want us to all just focus on that one in the top left hand corner and we watch it very, very closely. Watch as you see what happens.

Excuse me to all of the other ones. Watch as they change. Most of you sAId that all of them are exactly the same. Most of us would also agree that they don't necessarily look the same, that this is actually changing while we are watching it. The question is, is Kevin over here using a magic slide that is changing while we watch it?

Or are we changing while we're looking at something static? Are we becoming different? Is the perspective changing and it's changing the energy and the motion about what we're looking at? And there's nothing magical about all 16. So you're right, they're all exactly the same and even in a small scale like this, and there's nothing magic on the left.

So if we all just stare at our good friend on the right and watches it turns purple, and then those others, because they're not getting nearly as much of our focus, they start to turn blue. They start to seem like they're not as good. And if the job of those flowers, my, my hardworking employee flowers is to be purple and I've decided that the one on the right is purple, I'm going to start thinking the others are not necessarily doing their job. My brAIn's going to start constructing the reality saying those other three are just not quite as purple as Pete over here. And it changes the reality that I'm looking at.

Another way of saying that is what leaders choose to spotlight becomes the truth. So if I told you beforehand maybe you wanted to believe me, I sAId to just trust me, the one on the top right is the purple one. That's the truth. I let you in. I let you in the, you know the, in the inner circle to let you know what's going on.

I let you in the executive team meeting, I told you the truth. That's the best. That's the best employee that we have. That's the good one. Even if we really believe that they're all the same, when we put that focus on one, they all start to change.

So if we focus on problems, then we end up having a culture of risk and worry and apprehension. When we focus on potential, we end up having a culture of growth. Risk is okay, fAIl is okay. It's necessary for growth. When we change a perspective though on something that's bigger than maybe just looking at flowers, a situation that could have previously looked like a fAIlure, ah, that didn't do a good job of being purple like the chosen one did.

Maybe it looks just a little bit more like experimentation or progress. So when leaders can shift perspective and discover different types of opportunities, they're able to pick up things that others miss. I missed that I was wearing the glasses that I was looking for. It was just a perspective shift. They were right in front of me the whole time.

So the reality is fixed, but the way that we perceive that reality really isn't fixed and it's shaped by what we notice, what we choose to notice, oftentimes what other people tell us to notice. 'cause if you unequivocally believe me when I sAId the one on the left is the chosen one, it'd be really easy to act in accordance with that belief and treat the others like they simply weren't as good. Fortunately we all saw this from the right perspective right off the bat and sAId, nah, uhuh, they're all created equally. But what are the things that might look a little bit different in your workplace if you changed your gaze a little bit or what might look different if you just change the environment a little bit? So an opportunity to answer in the chat.

Let's think about our own personal awareness. What's something that you're focusing on right now that might be changing how you view the rest of your organization? What's got your focus at the moment? WAIting to see if anybody's going to put AI in here on this one. Ooh Michelle.

I like that one. Becoming laser focused on my work, changing my mindset. I know what I can do. That's beautiful, Richard. I could get on board with that.

I sure hope so. Ah, Jennifer, I love that focusing on that positivity. Really, really good stuff in here. A lot of the positive ones, which I'm loving to see. 'cause piggybacking on that point that we made before, we can't focus on two things at the same time.

Our brAIn doesn't let us. We can only focus on one versus the other. So when we're focusing on one thing that one thought like, I've lost my hat, or I can't find my glasses, it's, it prevents us from seeing the truth that's right in front of us and it can lock out those other possibilities as well, which is why we want to focus on the things we want for the future. Those of us that have been around at The Pacific Institute for a very long time, remember that the concept of worry is something that we call negative goal setting. It's just putting the thing you don't want in repetition on your mind and thinking about that.

And I'm thrilled to see that most of you do not have a tremendous amount of worry in front of you. It looks like you're putting the things that you want. If you do find that there's a lot of worry and you're accidentally setting goals for the things that you don't want, that would be a good opportunity to reach out to us and we can help walk you through some of the steps you can take to set goals for things that you do want and focus less on the things that you don't want. Perception though, when you think about having the ability to change perception, it starts to give you leverage. When you have the ability to take that step back first and you get good at looking at things differently, it changes how you're able to lead.

It changes the point from which you can provide your leadership. So attention is not neutral. What we choose to pay attention to, it's going to get resourced. What we don't will drift. RAIse your hand if you've ever been part of an organization that made some giant new initiative about what we are going to do, and it suddenly felt like everything that the company had ever done before was on the back burner.

RAIse your hand if every company you've ever been with does that three or four times a year. We can just keep those hands up. Sometimes it really happens. And what ends up taking place is most of the time what got the company to where it is, is what they stop paying attention to. And the core of the business, the good stuff, ends up drifting or an over focus on one type of a metric.

Too much focus on a particular KPI. You start focusing on that and the next thing you know, it starts getting resources. This is like the reason that the exercise industry has a million different devices for targeted body parts. Ooh, you don't like those love handles. There's about 8 million different things that you can spend your money on to be able to work on that.

Whatever we notice gets resourced, we put our money and our energy be behind, behind the things that we pay attention to. You start working on your yard, you better get ready to spend a whole bunch of your energy and time on it because when you notice it, we resource it. And all those thoughts that we have, the ones that we repeat specifically AKA known as beliefs, all based on our past, they place that pressure to perform and they shape what we see and the decisions that we make. We all put these things that we're focusing on for the future, which is outstanding, but we also have to stop and recognize that our decision making machine, that mechanism in our brAIn that tells us what we're going to do and the decisions we make moving forward, it's memory based. It's all based on the things that have happened in the past.

So with that leadership leverage, we realize that that level of perception is a tool that we can use. If we can understand that belief is behind behavior,

we have a lot more control over how we lead the people that we lead. So another chat option for you right now today, November. What do you find yourself noticing most about your team or your organization? What is getting the current level of focus? What are the love handles that you can't seem to stop focusing on in your organization right now?

Yeah, client engagement is one that comes up a lot, especially if you spent time doing a client engagement survey during 2025, trying to find out what exactly is going on. Great answers coming in off of the chat. Richard, I'm also looking forward to upleveling with you when we talk about leverage. Anything to add before I move to the next slide? Good stuff all around.

Really, really good answers coming in here. If you're finding yourself unmotivated, read back through the chat. There's some really good stuff going in here. One of my favorite things about these sessions on the first Friday of every month is some of the uplifting things you all put in the chat. If I don't say thank you enough, thank you, it makes my day.

Sometimes it makes a whole darn month. I've shared this slide before, but since we were talking about perspective as leverage, we want to focus on really what we mean by leverage. Hands up, rAIse your hand if you think results are important in your job. If there is something that relies on you producing the results. Okay, good.

Everybody has the ability to rAIse their hands. This is excellent. We all want a result. Every single person here, if we were looking at this teeter-totter, would want to put as much on the left as we possibly could so that we could send those, those results skyrocketing up. And those of us that learned a little bit about physics and those of us that didn't know that you don't get as much leverage when you're near the fulcrum.

We all want to build strategy. Most organizations are focused on a strategy and putting that strategy in place. And without a strategy, you definitely wouldn't go anywhere. It's like having directions. It's like having a map.

It's like having a blueprint. It's absolutely necessary. However, every strategy that has ever existed involves an action. And that action is almost always taken by a human being. So if you happen to work in an organization where the human beings are required to take action in order for the strategy to work, and you're like most of us, you realize that the behaviors need to be in alignment with the strategy in other in order for it to work.

Here's a strategy. Floss floss your teeth every single day. Cheryl and I talk about this all the time, dental floss doesn't do any good for you in the drawer. So the strategy doesn't do anything until there's an action. So the strategy is buying dental floss.

Good. Now there's the behavior. We actually have to use the dental floss. Now, if I don't believe that dental floss is going to do me any darn good, I'm not going to use the darn dental floss. And what good is that strategy?

But if I have the belief that it is part of good oral hygiene, it is how I'm going to keep the teeth in my mouth and stay away from the dentist and not be wearing dentures when I'm old, then I will engage in that behavior and follow the strategy. It's simple. When we think about brushing our teeth, we can connect the dots real easily. But when we think about our businesses, we have to recognize that that strategy may not be crystal clear to the individuals who need to take that behavior. It might be sort of like the strategy that we tried to explAIn to our children about the importance of brushing their teeth before they reached a certAIn age.

It's always been a good strategy, but they just didn't believe it was important until they reached an age, maybe like my son, where they were like, Ooh, girls, that's why I want to brush my teeth. New belief, new behavior, following the ever so good strategy that's put in place forever. Our organizations are just filled up with grownup versions of my son. We're all just kids that grow up that act in accordance with our beliefs. If we don't believe that our behaviors are going to work, we don't engage in them period.

So we can talk strategy, we can have yet another town hall meeting and walk the whole organization through the strategy. But at the end of the day, if we're trying to get these people to take different behaviors to follow that strategy, it starts with the conversation in their head. It starts with their beliefs. And the way that you have the most control over that conversation in their head is to recognize that organizations and cultures are really just describing the collective self-talk of all of the people inside of it. When me and Tracy and Richard all have our collective self-talk together and we act in accordance with the things that we say to ourselves collectively that forms the culture that we all work in, that shapes the beliefs that we have, that defines the behaviors that we take.

That determines are we going to follow the really good strategy we put in place?

Or are we going to leave the dental floss in the drawer? Fortunately, we take the dental floss out all the time, don't we, Tracy? So there's these unspoken filters that get in the way. Your message is going out. You are telling them about the strategy.

I was telling the kid about brushing his teeth, but beliefs create a filter. Remember I talked about that Raz, that's filtering our universe and our world around us. It's telling us what to pay attention and what to dismiss, what is important and what is not. Whether or not that spider over there in the corner of my eye because I hate spiders, is worthy of my attention or not. For my wife, it's crickets.

She doesn't care about spiders, but I tell you, she sees a cricket. Lots of beliefs come into play about what she chooses to pay attention to. And we all have our version of spiders and crickets in our workplace, what we're choosing to pay attention to and what we're choosing to ignore. So most of us are completely hell bent on knowing that we've seen reality, but what we're seeing is filtered. We just had Halloween, I made this joke the other day.

Every Halloween you see the sunny and Cher costumes. Sunny's got his red glasses on, Cher's got her yellow ones on, and they spend an entire night at that Halloween party looking through the world through a different color lens. It's not until they take it off that they realize what everything really looked like. Wow, that color looks different. When I don't have my rose colored glasses on, literally the red ones, wow, that looks a little bit different when I'm not wearing my yellow seventies sunny and shared glasses.

We see it through a filter. We just have to get good at taking the filter off. And normally that filter is things like metrics, comfort zones, expectations, but fundamentally it's just our beliefs. So when we stop questioning these things and we don't have a questioning lens, we start mistaking habits that we have and typical ways of behaving and thinking for the actual truth. But we've always done it that way around here.

So that is just how it is. That is the truth. So another chat opportunity for you. Stop and think about, I'll leave this one up for a minute or two here. What's one belief that you think you might hold onto or your organization might hold onto that could potentially be stopping you from seeing something?

Pick a minute to answer that one. I'm sure we're, we're about to see some entries in the chat like yours, Kevin. Um, this one's hard. What we don't see is hard because you don't know what you don't see. You're blind to it.

So one of the best ways to get a better answer to this question is to ask the humans around you. But you gotta make it safe for 'em. You genuinely want to know and anything's okay. The point Richard's making is the joke that I always say, the only way you'll ever know what the back of your head looks like is with a mirror a friend. And it usually takes two mirrors to get there, but only one friend.

Some real good and honest answers coming in here. A lot of folks nodding along everybody's head is just, oh yeah, I agree too. All right, so moving on from here. Let's take a look and see then what we see another fixed image for you. Let's see the answers in the chat.

We are looking at an image. There is certAInly an orange circle. Where do your eyeballs tell you that's located? Where do we see the yellow or the orange circle? All righty, we've got a handful of answers coming in here.

So let's just start with one option. RAIse your hand or gimme a thumbs up some indication if you believe we are looking at what is maybe a glass cube, and this is a floating sphere floating in the center of it,

that it's floating in the middle of a cube. RAIse your hand if that's what you see when you look at this. All right, A handful of folks see that I made the slide so I get to tell you exactly where it is. I'm the only one that really knows how many of you say no, no, no. Silly Kevin.

It is a uh, a glass cube, but it's on the front panel. It's in the top left hand corner. Ah, there it is. That's where it looks like when we looked on this one. Wherever you think it might be, I want you to just pay attention to where it goes when I get rid of the supporting.

So now we've heard two options. Some people sAId it floated in the middle, some people sAId maybe it's on the front panel. How many of you walked around the back of this cube and sAId, nuh, it's in the lower left hand corner on the backhand side. I'm looking through this darn thing, right? So me and lolly and a few others, heck yeah.

What you guys don't look at the front of the problem, go around, observe the whole thing. It's back there regardless of where you thought it was. When we go back to the static image, where does your brAIn move it? Can you move it to each and every one of the locations? Has the cube itself started to move on you yet has it started to shift?

Many people will start to say, whoa, hold on it inverted. How many of you look at this and say, what are you talking about Kevin? This is not a 3D image. This is like chalk that is drawn on the ground and this is just a square with a circle in the middle of it. No 3D images whatsoever.

And how many of you are like, no, no, no. You have to be an even bigger thinker, Kevin. You go all the way around to the very back of that square and it's just the lower left corner no matter what. It's just going to keep moving back and forth. Now, not once has the circle moved.

Not once, but how much has it felt like We've gone on a journey around the whole frigging cube at this point because of what our brAIn allows us to do when we change just a little bit. And yes, this is still the same image, it's just smaller. But some people will tell me that it looks like it's in a different space when I do this one. But it never changes. It's static.

It's been exactly the same the whole time. We've just been changing. It looked a little bit different in the summer than it did in the spring than it did in the fall. But we're the one that's changing. Our brAIn is reorienting the shape based on where we are focusing and where we are placing our attention.

Whatever you saw first, we call that your starting block. That's where you began. That's your personal truth. So if Cheryl opened this up, she saw saw it floating in the middle. From that point forward, every single conflicting image was conflicting.

Cheryl's truth. If I wanted Cheryl's behavior to change, I can't just tell her it's on the back. Trust me, I'm going to need to make sure that she sees it and understands it the same way that I do. 'cause otherwise her frame won't change. And that's the importance of framing in leadership.

A situation can look completely different to two different people depending on how we construct the view. If you go around the back of the problem like lolly and I did, it looks totally different than the rest of us who sAId, nah, it's on the front and totally different than those of us that sAId, what's the matter with you? It's located in the middle. So where have you flipped a perspective on a challenge or a person, maybe that person that you didn't think could that one day you discovered could. Where have you flipped a perspective on a challenge or person?

And then what was the change as a result? Take a minute to put a few chat answers in here. Flipping perspectives. There's A non-work example. Those of us that watch sports, we get new players that join our teams every year.

Sometimes if those new players that join our teams do not perform terribly well in the first game of the season, we make a determination that that player sucks. And it's not until proof later on and typically five or six or seven good games before we change our perspective. But then what changes is suddenly we have a different expectation around that person. Suddenly we no longer think this new corner that we added gets scored on every single time they throw deep on 'em. Instead, we start to believe we can trust this rookie.

This is exciting. We're going to change our entire defensive scheme because I believe in this person. Richard, put a good honest answer in the chat there. Once we lock into a perspective, once we establish that, we start to act in accordance with that. We start to treat it like it's our own personal truth.

And if we have given sanction to something that is perhaps not the truth, but just our truth, that's where we can start having a lot of conflict with those that are around us. Who's right in our image here.

There's really no way of knowing. There's no way of knowing without a discussion. The more people are in our organization, the more discussions have to happen because it is a six. When you're on the left, you're a hundred percent right that it is a six. But if you don't walk around to the other side and consider the other perspective, you're going to think the person standing across from you is an absolute moron who doesn't know what they're looking at until they change their perspective.

Imagine two companies that were both successful, one had been on the left, one had been on the right, and they come together and merge. Like a lot of the companies that we work with do. When their two cultures come together and they decide we're going to move forward based on the way we've always done. One half of the company moves to the camp of six, the other goes to the camp of nine, and they both tell each other, you've got a bad attitude. If you've ever been in a company that merged, you've probably experienced something that felt exactly like that.

Especially when we do autopsies of two successful companies that merged together but somehow don't work. We almost always find there's an awful lot of sixes and nines that weren't discussed and a lot of M'S that turned into W's and a lot of zeros that really should have been o's. But both people are looking at the same thing. But because they've established a perspective, they've decided the other person is wrong, they're rooted in their own belief, they're certAIn, and because they've always thought about it and only seen it this way, how could it be anything else in leadership? What we often find is that disagreement is more frequently.

Not that there were conflicting facts, but that two people were looking at the exact same thing from a different standpoint that Richard and I were butting heads, not because we couldn't agree of what we were looking at, we couldn't agree what to call it 'cause he was right side up and I was upside down. So how about perspectives? In your work, where have you seen two people see the exact same situation? Completely differently. I'll give you some extra time on this one.

Where have people been able to see his situation completely differently? It's the work equivalent of the people who say, oh, it's rAIning. We can't go outside. Versus the people that say it's rAIning. We get to go play in the puddles In person versus remote.

There is some cognitive dissonance. The leadership team says, we have to get all of these people back into the office so that they will do the work they're supposed to. The employees have a perspective of, I get a lot more done when I can do laundry and pick my kids up from school. They're looking at the exact same situation from a drastically different perspective. If they don't have a conversation, they're going to scream six and nine at each other until they're blue in the face and somebody leaves good answers in the chat.

Thank you all for being honest and vulnerable. So what ends up happening with limited perspective? When we don't stop and take a look more frequently, we don't stop and double check. Are we wearing the glasses that we're looking for? We end up realizing that our culture gets shaped not only by what leaders reward, but also by what people overlook and ignore.

And that cultures are not necessarily what we tell people that they could and should and are supposed to do. But oftentimes culture is shaped by what we ignore and what we overlook and what we allow to take place. Unfortunately, that tends to be what shapes culture a lot. And the things that are invisible that we choose not to look at, they become untouchable. And then when we develop the habit of not seeing things, then we develop the habit of ignoring things and ignoring other things.

And that's true of people and of things. So we're not able to lead those and what that we cannot see. So if we need to get good at perspective

and seeing more than just the first of the 16 flowers, we need to get better at taking time to focus on all 16 of the flowers to determine is only the one I'm focusing on, the good one at any given time. And if so, it's a perspective issue. It's not a personnel issue. So what's one area of your team that you think you should focus on? What's one area of your culture that you rarely focus on, but maybe you should?

What's the uh, the back corner or the hall closet of your organization that you're simply not giving the attention to? As somebody who just cleaned the closet last weekend, I know how tedious it is. Asked this one of a group the other day and one of the big answers that came out was connection, which is not focusing on humans connecting mostly remote organization, but recognizing that they don't spend enough time having the equivalent of break room conversations. So creating space to intentionally have conversations, to just have discussions about what's going on with your kids' soccer like human beings do. Here's another fun perspective one, which is the big one, using our giant brAIns.

Looking at this, even knowing that I'm trying to trick you, which one at least looks like it's the big one. Now if you have kids that have TikTok, you get a whole bunch of stuff like this, you see it all the time. If I tell you that they're all the same size, you'll agree with me because I made the slides. If I was to tell you which one looks like it's the biggest, most of us agree. The one in the back by the door looks like it's the big one.

And even though we know that they're the exact same size, there's still that little mechanism in your brAIn. It's like, yeah, but it's just like a little bit bigger. It's like a little bit fatter. And it's because of the perspective, it's because of where it was placed. It is the exact same one.

When I built the slides, I used the exact same things and I just copied and pasted four times. But our brAIn isn't going to going to stop changing that message. And that's true of a lot of the folks that are working around us. A lot of the things that are happening in our environment, in our workplace is there's a little bit of a scale and there's a way that we end up framing what takes place. And with leadership, we're going to frame what's urgent, what the burning platform is, is going to be set by the leader.

What feels big? What do we absolutely have to do this week at all costs? And what ends up getting acted upon? And when the perspective is only that of a small subset of the leaders who are maybe not seeing things from other perspective, you could very easily be chasing the wrong problem thinking it's bigger than it really is. There is a version of this that I don't have where there actually is they put the bigger one in the foreground and they all still look the same size.

But in this particular one, they're exactly the same one. But that's the power of perception is that it'll change what you're potentially going to take action on. So one more question for you. What's something in your work that might feel bigger than it really is? What's something that might feel like it's getting maybe more attention simply because of the way it's being framed, allowing time for those to come in.

But in the interest of time, I'm going to jump forward here. What we're focusing on is trying to change the lens. I changed the lens once my daughter sAId, the hat that you're yelling about is on your head. I put on a different lens. I was able to effectively put on her lens, the person who finally looked at me and sAId, where's all this noise coming from?

From this dingdong that lost his hat that he's wearing? When you see things with familiar eyes, it's a totally different perspective. It took one second to then change that. I didn't control the lens though. I was too caught up being angry that I couldn't find my hat.

I needed somebody else. So a little bit of teamwork came in handy there. So I'm going to skip over this question 'cause I want us to jump over to the next point here, which is we all have a different perspective on a really interesting topic like AI. RAIse your hand if AI comes up as a topic in your workplace from time to time. RAIse your hand if it's been the actual discussion of an entire meeting slash workshop slash weekend getaway.

Okay, so it's, it's big. We hear this stuff too. We work with leaders all the time and we hear really sincere and honest discussions from leaders and we're responding accordingly. So what we are doing is we are intentionally building some more of our programming around the concept of AI and AI philosophy because learning for leaders and leading for leaders is going to be different than it's been in the past. And there's some changes that have to take place with AI.

So we're going to ask everybody here if we could take just a minute. This is about a two minute survey. I'm going to drop this in the chat as well. But I'd love it if everybody could take two or three minutes here before I put up one or two more slides to go ahead and just complete this quick little survey that asks you some questions about how your organization is handling the ever present topic of AI. I'll give you a sneak preview when we come back on December 5th.

Our beyond limit session is going to be about the culture of AI. We're going to be using your responses to this survey to help shape that. So take a minute to fill out a couple of answers here and we'll come back and wrap up with just a few additional points. If you haven't, there's enough time to come back to that one. I really appreciate you taking the time to do that.

We'll be using that information to help shape some of the programming that we are developing, some of the interviews that we're going to be doing with uh, leaders and executive leaders. On that note, if you happen to be a leader or an executive leader and you're willing to spend 10 or 15 minutes with us, we would love to do an interview to have an in-depth discussion with you about the challenges that you're facing, not with the technology or adoption of AI, but with the human component and how people are responding to that, what it's potentially doing to your culture, the types of concerns and apprehensions and excitements you have about an AI future. We'd love to spend some time with you to have a discussion to help build our future programming around that. As we get closer to rounding out our time here. I just want to thank everybody for being here, as always stepping into a space, participating in the chat, being willing to be open and honest with us.

And one final thought would be, if you changed perspective, what could you potentially start to see? What might you start noticing that you don't presently see today? And we will be back agAIn in future sessions. So if you would like to come back, you can always fill out our final survey here. If you would like to engage with us further, here are the opportunities to do so.

You can scan the QR code, you can emAIl me or you can click the link that I put in the chat, which has the exact same survey, as well as my emAIl address. Anything that you would like to learn more about, if you'd like to schedule a time with us, scan that QR code or send me an emAIl directly and I will follow up with you. But we have four whole remAIning minutes. I'll stick around if anybody has any questions. But as always, thank you everybody for your time and for your attention and sharing some time with us on a Friday morning.

We'll be back on December 5th. One other reminder that if you have registered for our executive impact sessions, we have one one week from today at this exact same time. You'll see an emAIl coming out about that agAIn later today. But thank you everybody for your time. Have a wonderful rest of your Friday.